Finance committee  Good afternoon. My name is Sunil Johal, and I'm the policy director at the Mowat Centre with the University of Toronto. I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to participate in these pre-budget consultations. My remarks will focus on the role of infrastructure inves

Finance committee  Thanks for the question. My view and the Mowat Centre's view would be that the EI program has a lot of flaws. The premium rates are certainly one of those flaws in terms of funds that are being reallocated unnecessarily from EI and not going to workers who need the support from

Finance committee  Our report specifically focused on the fact that the provinces are going to be compelled to go along with the federal income-splitting proposal if it is introduced as a result of their having signed on to tax collection agreements over the past number of years, which were intende

Finance committee  From our perspective, asset recycling is one of those tools that hasn't been explored very much in Canada. For those who aren't aware of what it is, essentially it's a case where governments will dispose of old assets that aren't fulfilling their original public policy purpose.

Finance committee  Yes, and essentially take the proceeds from the disposition of that asset and then put it toward the construction of a new asset that might be more in keeping with the needs of the country at the current time. I don't really think there is an issue in terms of our federal syste

Finance committee  I can answer that briefly, and then perhaps Mr. Roschlau may want to chime in. There are huge pools of capital that we're not really tapping into, so the first real issue is that the federal government needs to bring the pension funds to the table and talk to them about some of

Finance committee  Sure. Adequate referred to the level of funding. As I mentioned, in Ontario about 12% of infrastructure investments come from the federal government. The other 88% come from the Ontario government and local governments. That's adequate. In terms of being aligned, I think that wi

Finance committee  I don't know for a fact. It would be roughly comparable. There may be some variations, but it would be in the same order of magnitude.

Finance committee  We have looked on Infrastructure Canada's website. This was a $1-billion program from 2009 to 2014, and essentially about $150 million was just unexplained. It's not clear what that money has been used for or whether it has been used, whereas other money from that fund has been d

Finance committee  I think one of the ways to fix that is to look at the federal requirements for matching funds and the deadlines for those matching funds, because I think in a number of cases we've seen municipalities and/or provinces being forced to quickly come up with funding to match a federa

Finance committee  From our perspective, not really. It doesn't really make sense that P.E.I. and Ontario get exactly the same amount of money for a significant portion of a fund, when they obviously have massively different populations and needs.

Finance committee  I wouldn't characterize it as anything, but I think others can characterize it the way they want. Yes, we had a hard time finding a public policy rationale for that.

Finance committee  No. I think the intention of asset recycling is you take the funds from the disposition of legacy assets and put them toward new assets. It's explicitly not intended to pay down deficit or debt.

Finance committee  I would.

Finance committee  I don't know exactly the answer to that, to be honest with you. I would have to do some more research on—